In The Nineties We Had Hope, Part 1

Hey, "Creatives," where are all the heroes?

I was lucky enough to share a glass of wine with a Russian artist right after the Russian invasion of Ukraine.  He and his family had left their home in St Petersburg, part of the brain-drain Russia experienced in the weeks and months following Putin’s decision to embark on that criminal act of disastrous adventurism.  It was March, 2022, still early in the war.  As we spoke about Russia and its recent past since the fall of the Soviet Union, this man, some years older than me and not a master of the English language, was struggling to find words when this sentence came from his lips: “In the nineties we had hope.” 

There is always a risk that such statements can work an inappropriate nostalgia on the middle-aged mind, that being young when the 90s were in full swing could make me susceptible to fallacious reasoning.  It’s easy to have hope when you are in your twenties; I likewise had hope, and it stands to reason that the era might instill in me a sense that the era itself was, therefore, more hopeful.  However, I can’t shake the statement out of my head.  Two of my children are teens, one is headed to college next year, and my third child is in double digits with puberty banging on the door.  They have hope for themselves and their futures, and I have hope for them, but I find myself increasingly hopeless about politics–global and domestic–social-change, and that elusive, possibly illusory, possibly fictional, concept: progress.  

In recent years I have shared media from my teens and twenties with my maturing children.  The West Wing is what we are working through at the moment.  Aside from the depth of the characters, the excellent production values, the superb acting, and the extraordinary quality of the writing, this “cultural product” of my lifetime illuminates some of the hope and general tone of that time quite well.  Sadly, upon recent viewing, The West Wing left me with a somewhat bleak sense of the present.  

The West Wing, as many of you know, was Aaron Sorkin’s love-letter to the United States, our culture, and our government, from a center-left perspective that seems woefully, depressingly out of date in today’s Democratic party.  An erudite, humorous, dramatic, patriotic show that tried to make the case for the American system of government by presenting an earnest set of hard-working, brilliant people striving for the greater good.  It was acceptable in the 90s to be on the left and love one’s country.  It was understood that there were “sins'' in the history of our country, that past administrations had made terrible mistakes, but that the uses of government were many in making the country progress, and that, despite our flaws, America has been, and continues to be, a beacon of hope in the world.  The post-cold-war world was complicated, but through The West Wing lens it seemed manageable, and victory in that cold-war had, somewhat miraculously, not yet turned us inward against each other.  In real life, the Clinton administration was not the worst.  Between scandals, the 90s were a time of policy shifts, of continuing declines in crime, poverty, and general suffering across the spectrum of America’s communities.  Clinton’s much maligned military interventions overseas were inspired by humanitarian concerns, his administration worked for peace everywhere there was conflict.  Most notably, his administrations interventions in the Yugoslav Wars, Northern Ireland, successes on the one hand, and, sadly relevant failures to our own times, Israel and the larger Middle East on the other hand.  There was a booming economy, a novel internet technology too slow to distract us all the time, and even a government budget surplus (?!?).  Progress was expected to be incremental by enough people that patience had not yet run out on discourse and activism.  Granted, we had to meet each other in the public square–not on X or Ticktock–and look each other in the eye to disagree.  That helped.   

Despite my disagreements with the Biden administration’s policies, there is a bit of an afterglow of The West Wing in today’s White House, especially in contrast to Trump’s spleen-venting talk-at-everyone style, and Obama’s reputation of talking to no one at all.  However, Biden is old, and anyone remaining silent about that is doing so willfully, and somewhat stupidly, just as the Orange Wildebeest of Mara Lago casts an ever-widening shadow over the forthcoming presidential election.  From all accounts, Biden has brought a legislator's habits to the Oval Office, and compromise following conversation is the culture he has built.  But again, he is old, he cannot communicate, and he cannot win.  The reason why animal rights will never take the form PETA pushes for is that animals cannot speak for themselves (also bacon, steak, lamb shank, and fried chicken, but that’s a different essay).  No civil rights movement can succeed without the voice to those for whom the movement is dedicated.  No political movement can succeed without the same.  Biden could barely form a sentence before he turned 80, and now the sun is setting on any remaining ability he has for vocal advocacy.  The West Wing dream may have found some expression in Biden’s White House, but The West Wing’s President Bartlett was, above all, a communicator.  As the primary season approaches, and the polls darken, and the capricious American public lifts its eyes to the franchise, it is hard not to see another Trump administration as inevitable.  Nearly all the polling data is indicating such an outcome, and unless Nikki Haley pulls off a stunning upset in New Hampshire, I think that’s where we’re heading. 

When I view old West Wing episodes, a deep and terrible pathos rises in me when images of the Trump administration jump into my head.  Yes, the policy talk is rich and sophisticated, and Sorkin is surprisingly good at taking two sides, giving voice to positions he obviously doesn’t endorse.  However, the truly inspiring elements of the show are the little things like the manners modeled by the show in the person and presence of the President–”When the President stands, no one sits.”  Attendance and dress at diplomatic events, the respect due to the presence of the President by his guards, his staff, even his family, and the casual way President Bartlett sets a dignified tone in every scene he is in.  These traditions and habits give the viewer an inside look at a place where formality and respect were intertwined with position earned from merit; where power was assumed as a burden and used in service to others.  Yes, it was fiction, but it wasn’t a lie.  American history is full of men and women who served this way in West Wings of the past, in Congress, in the military, in activism, in day to day lives.  It isn’t hard to find greatness in our past, though I can hear the unearned, thoughtless cynicism from the left. “Well you know, Clinton was blah blah, Monica Lewinski, blah, W. Bush blah.”  This is the commentary from the peanut gallery of half-men, throwing their low opinion of themselves at even the promise of greatness.  Professional and semi-professional cynics who, in tearing down heroes of other times, relieve themselves of the responsibility of aspiring to heroism.  It takes an awful lot of educated blindness to attack the Washingtons, Lincolns, Grants, and Roosevelts, and it’s all the rage these days.    

Yes, in the 90s we had irony and we were suspicious, but the hope kept irony under good observation and from becoming decadent cynicism.  The West Wing and other Sorkin works of the era (The American President, A Few Good Men), were grounded in tradition and reality, despite the fictional presentation.  Now the unapologetically left-wing Hollywood has ruined storytelling in a media landscape of mediocrities, Picard being a perfect example of that sort of thing.  Star Trek, The Next Generation lacked The West Wing’s audience, but in the figure of Jean Luc Picard we had another model of masculinity and leadership, of principle and grace.  Like President Bartlett, Captain Picard could be both erudite and dangerous, combining ideals and power, willing to use the latter only in service of the former.  For anyone hopeful for a new iteration of stories with Picard leading a new “Next Generation” to brave new worlds, too bad.  Not only was the content of Picard’s character assassinated within a few episodes (metaphorically, this is not a spoiler, not that anyone should ever watch the show. . .), but the entire setting of the galaxy, the not-quite-but-close utopian United Federation of Planets, was reworked into a dystopia.  What was left was a series of quasi-left-wing story-lines and tropes, confused characterizations and further character assassinations of beloved characters, sprinkled liberally with a series of Remember-Berries for idiots to pluck out of every episode (and no, I don’t think the 3rd season really saved much simply by not being as terrible as seasons 1 and 2).  Nothing was elevated; nothing was illuminating.  

I am compelled to remind myself that it is from stories that we build our own lives, from fictions that we set our goals, craft our own expectations, build our new mythologies, learn how to behave properly.  Artists in the media of today have abandoned any sense of responsibility towards those ends in favor of vague virtue signaling and Machiavellian plot-lines–and worse than that they seem to be doing it without any talent for writing and directing.  

Even when depicting non-fiction, modern Hollywood can’t seem to lead, and can’t resist leveling greatness to make it more palatable.  Take several examples of popular cultural presentations of President Lyndon Johnson.  LBJ, in Bill Moyers’ words, “Thirteen of the most complex men I ever knew,” was the single most transformative president since Franklin Roosevelt, helping to end extreme poverty in this country, and passing the Civil and Voting Rights Acts in back-to-back years.  And how do the films LBJ and The Butler and Selma depict him?  A profane, n-word dropping barbarian who talks to people while taking a shit.  It’s amazing that LBJ could even get up on his hind-legs long enough to push through legislation.   

We like that in our new America.  Yes, it's true, he did all of those things–he was that man, too.  But storytelling is about making choices about what to include, and what to preclude, and there were 12 other LBJs who could have taken the place of the base-neanderthal man wiping his ass while barking at his staff.  When we countenance such depraved titillations in our culture, the artist says little about the historical figure being exploited for our diversion, but we end up saying a lot about who we are as consumers.  Which is, essentially, cowards; small minded fools threatened by greatness.  We want our public figures to be bad enough to make us feel better about our own mediocrity.  We almost demand it.  No one would buy it otherwise. 

You need only look at the latest spectacle from Ridley Scott to see that.  Napoleon, an ahistorical clusterfuck of goofball stupidity (with a few great battle set-pieces), presented one of the most charismatic and brilliant men in history as a bumbling whining cuckolded goon who has one military victory and trips and falls onto an emperor’s crown, seemingly by accident.  Then Ridley Scott treats us to a preachy final crawl of death statistics from the Napoleonic Wars, not so subtly, and somewhat childishly, saying “See what he did!  He was bad!”  Napoleon is just the latest example from our current media that refuses to allow men to be great.  There would be no West Wing today unless the President was banging an intern, no Picard unless he was dropping f-bombs, no LBJ without toilet paper in his hands.  

I am no fan of Napoleon Bonaparte, and I have problems with LBJ, but I am not so insecure that I refuse to recognize men who were more accomplished, greater in gifts and ambition and drive, and just better at life in many regards than I am.  Our national narcissism will not abide heroes.  Or at least our artists don’t think so.  

In the nineties we had hope.  But it wasn’t long before The West Wing was eclipsed by The Sopranos and its many, many offspring: Sons of Anarchy, Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad, Dexter, Mad Men, House of Cards, Succession, Yellowstone.  Stories of tragedies of great men who fall are worth telling as well, of course, but the most stunning aspect of the above not exhaustive list of programming is how cookie-cutter they all are.  We seem endlessly amused by anti-heroes and evil men and women, backstabbing, plotting, scheming, who stand for little, and fight only for themselves (The Sopranos' last few episodes and courageous last moments are a testament to a show-creator and writing staff exposing the audience to its own depravity.  This could be its own essay as well, but I thought it bears mentioning that sometimes artists themselves are haunted by what they hath wrought).  Essentially, we want to see some version of ourselves with power.  Occasionally there is a nod to morality, a vague sense that innocence is important to protect, children are still sacrosanct (for now), racists and homophobes are bad, white people are, more often than not, bad as well.  But the overall nihilism of the last 20 years is pretty overwhelming.  20 years of anti-heroes, 20 years of depraved torture porn, 20 years of “strong female characters” with no femininity, 20 years of men without chests (except Captain America, thank God), 20 years of 80s nostalgia, the era not coincidentally birthed Donald J. Trump.  

We have entered a period of Cultural Inflation–the value and quality of our entertainments have declined as their number has increased.  There is so much to stream, so much to see, so many hours of binging and viewing, and so many secondary media outlets wherein one’s useless opinion can be spewed into the echo-chamber of one’s choice on the vast interwebs, that there isn’t any time or space for writers or directors to learn their craft before they are given the latest Marvel show to excrete.  In addition to accelerated career development amongst the creative class, I think its safe to assume that there has been a dilution of the talent pool as the number of streaming services and studios have increased the sheer number of products: “content” has grown faster than our population.  That, combined with ideological uniformity, demands for “representation,” a shrinking of story-possibilities, and the limitation of previously existing marketable brands, reboots, prequels and sequels, and it’s no wonder that Disney is losing money hand-over-fist, that Netflix subscriber-base is declining, that HBO is scrambling to make Max profitable, that Paramount had to combine forces with HBO after the mergers with Warner Bros, etc., etc.    

Not that any of that should make a difference, though.  The real problem is that we have so little hope.  We have produced numerous disaster films, and numerous dystopian worlds, and numerous facsimiles of the Sopranos, and the one thing they all share in theme and trope is cynical hopelessness.  I’m not sure where the chicken ends and the egg begins, though.  I look at the upcoming election, at the wars overseas, at college-campuses on fire with half-baked, ill-informed outrage, at an environmental discussion dominated by ideologues on the left and blindness on the right, at Communist China’s Ahab-like hunt for recognition and power as it declines, at Europe’s tepid mediocrity and political confusion as it declines, at Putin, period, at our inability to have a rational conversation about immigration, abortion, trans-issues, education, mental health, race relations, crime, taxes, and a national debt reaching such a magnitude that it has long since moved beyond the understanding of mortal men, and it does seem rather bleak.  

But I am Generation X, and that means I remember hope.  A hope tinged with an irony-infused realism.  There are times when artists need to lead, when “content creators” need to take risks, when they need to get out in front of the zeitgeist, instead of being batted around in its tempest.  Now would be the time.